Keyword: policestate

President Barack Obama today introduced his plan for a progressive takeover of state and local policing. “We have a great opportunity… to really transform how we think about community law enforcement relations,” he said Monday. “We need to seize that opportunity… this is something that I’m going to stay very focused on in the months to come,” Obama said, as he touted a new interim report from his Task Force on 21st Century Policing. Obama also instructed his media allies to help a federalization of policing, and to sideline critics of centralized policing rules. “I expect our friends in the...

The latest example of cellphone video vindicating someone from false charges is a doozy. It comes from Washington Parish, La., and WWL TV. One of the worst days of Douglas Dendinger’s life began with him handing an envelope to a police officer. In order to help out his family and earn a quick $50, Dendinger agreed to act as a process server, giving a brutality lawsuit filed by his nephew to Chad Cassard as the former Bogalusa police officer exited the Washington Parish Courthouse. The handoff went smoothly, but Dendinger said the reaction from Cassard, and a group of officers...

The US Department of Justice and embattled mayor Rahm Emanuel are under mounting pressure to investigate allegations of what one politician called “CIA or Gestapo tactics” at a secretive Chicago police facility exposed by the Guardian.Politicians and civil-rights groups across the US expressed shock upon hearing descriptions of off-the-books interrogation at Homan Square, the Chicago warehouse that multiple lawyers and one shackled-up protester likened to a US counter-terrorist black site in a Guardian investigation published this week. As three more people came forward detailing their stories of being “held hostage” and “strapped” inside Homan Square without access to an attorney...

Amherst, MA– University of Massachusetts Amherst student, Thomas Donovan, who is majoring in legal studies and had planned to become a Massachusetts State Trooper, has filed a lawsuit alleging his civil rights were violated after he was pepper sprayed, assaulted, and arrested for filming police brutality. The officer also repeatedly stomped on his cellphone in an attempt to destroy the evidence and cover up the crime- but the video survived.

It seemed like a typical congressional meeting for the Republic of Texas. Senators and the president gathered in the center of a Bryan, Texas, meeting hall, surrounded by public onlookers, to debate issues of the national currency, develop international relations and celebrate the birthday of one of their oldest members. But this wasn't 1836, and this would be no ordinary legislative conference. Minutes into the meeting a man among the onlookers stood and moved to open the hall door, letting in an armed and armored force of the Bryan Police Department, the Brazos County Sheriff's Office, the Kerr County Sheriff's...

A video posted to YouTube this week shows what appeared to be an elderly man being tasered by police with his hands up. The video, reportedly taken near Key West, Fla., shows two officers and an unidentified man during a traffic stop. The apparently older man slowly leaves his car with his hands raised and is tasered by one of the officers. Little is known about the incident in the video, which was originally taken down. An edited version of the video was uploaded Monday by a blog run by Info Wars.

The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site. The facility, a nondescript warehouse on Chicago’s west side known as Homan Square, has long been the scene of secretive work by special police units. Interviews with local attorneys and one protester who spent the better part of a day shackled in Homan Square describe operations that deny access to basic constitutional rights.

Just minutes after being declared mentally incompetent, a shackled Dasyl Jeanette Rios was tugged by her feet down a courthouse hallway. “All I wanted to do was sob for a few minutes. Cry. I wanted to cry for a few minutes because my life is in your hands,” Dasyl Jeanette Rios said, wailing, as she was pulled by a Broward Sheriff’s deputy with her feet shackled through a Florida courthouse on Monday. The 28-year-old woman had just been declared mentally incompetent before she was dragged like a suitcase through the hallways by Christopher Johnson. The disturbing incident was captured on...

Ft. Lauderdale, FL– A video uploaded to YouTube on Sunday shows Fort Lauderdale police officer Victor Ramirez harassing and assaulting an elderly gentleman at the Broward Bus Terminal in downtown Fort Lauderdale. The man is not being aggressive or threatening in any way when he is shoved to the ground and slapped by the officer. The man was reportedly trying to use the bus terminal’s restroom. “The guy didn’t raise his hand to the officer at all,” a witness told Local 10 News. “The officer just knocked him down with his hands. The guy was defenseless.”

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog The â€śmost transparent administration in historyâ€ť says it wonâ€™t let the public see its 332 page net neutrality plan until after the FCC votes on itsÂ implementation The Obama administration has just said that it wonâ€™t let the public see its 332 page proposal for net neutrality until after the FCC votes on its implementation.Which reminds me of this Nancy Pelosi gem regarding Obamacare:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoE1R-xH5ToRepublican FCC Commissioner Ajit Paisaid has seen the proposal. Paisaid said Obamaâ€™s net neutrality plan was 332 pages long, and that:â€śIt gives the FCC the power to micromanage virtually every aspect of how...

President George W. Bush was fond of saying that "9/11 changed everything." He used that one-liner often as a purported moral basis to justify the radical restructuring of federal law and the federal assault on personal liberties over which he presided. He cast aside his oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution; he rejected his oath to enforce all federal laws faithfully; and he moved the government decidedly in the direction of secret laws, secret procedures and secret courts. During his presidency, Congress enacted the Patriot Act. This legislation permits federal agents to write their own search warrants when...

Rand Paul does a lot of interviews -- a lot. This, from time to time, has gotten him in trouble. Rarely, though, has it gone as poorly as this. Speaking Monday afternoon with CNBC, Paul: 1) Reiterated his contention that vaccines should be voluntary. 2) Said this: "I have heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking, normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines." (Michele Bachmann said something similar during the 2012 presidential campaign. It didn't go over well.) 3) Actually shushed the anchor when he thought she wasn't allowing him to answer her questions.

California's measles outbreak has climbed to 91 confirmed cases, prompting a vicious attack from USA Today contributor Alex Berezow against "anti-vaxxers." He blames them for the epidemic that CDC officials say was introduced at the Disneyland theme park by a person infected with measles overseas. Berezow's knee-jerk reaction is to declare, "Parents who do not vaccinate their children should go to jail." He erroneously maintains that measles could not spread in a fully vaccinated society and discredits as "ludicrous" concerns regarding the safety and effectiveness of vaccines. Claiming there is a "mountain of data" proving otherwise, his one and only...

An internal ruling made by the Venezuelan Ministry of Defense, published on Tuesday, January 27, in state newsletter Gaceta Oficial, legalizes the use of lethal weapons by the national armed forces (FANB) against protesters. [snip] Under Venezuelan law, the Defense Ministry does not have the authority to override or ignore the Constitution and the norms contained therein. María Esperanza Hermida, coordinator for enforcement in Venezuelan NGO (Provea) argued that the measure violates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), as well as transferring competencies to the military which are the...

Are you starting to forget just how creepy government agencies can be when they decide to spy on average (law abiding) citizens? Well, this should help refocus your distrust of big government.Â According to AP News:The Drug Enforcement Administration abandoned an internal proposal to use surveillance cameras for photographing vehicle license plates near gun shows in the United States to investigate gun-trafficking, the agency's chief said Wednesday.Um, goodâ€¦ Also: Â“What the heck?Â”So the DEA was planning on tracking everyone that went to a gun show? Wowâ€¦ Nothing like being innocent until proven guilty, right? It might be time to start borrowing...

The creator, director and producer of the controversial movie about the encroaching police state and FEMA camps in America, David Crowley, has been found dead with his wife and young daughter over the weekend. The police are calling it a murder-suicide incident yet not ruling out anything suspicious. The movie was currently in production and Crowley had recently received a contract of $30 million to complete the project of his dreams. While depression can have its harshest affects on people, his friends and co-workers have stated that the police story is highly unlikely.

A multi-unit suspect manhunt is ongoing in Polk County after an armed robbery Thursday afternoon led to a chase and the discovery of two apparent murder victims in a Haines City home. According to the Polk County Sheriff's Office, two armed and dangerous suspects remain at large. A search for the suspects is ongoing and residents in the Chanler Ridge community have been asked to stay in their homes and lock their doors. Meanwhile, some residents that tried to come home later have been kept out of their neighborhood since Thursday afternoon. Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said that two...

Do you know what an â€śextremistâ€ť is? In the wake of the horrible terror attacks on the offices of Charlie Hebdo in France, Barack Obama is speaking very boldly about the need to win the war against â€śextremistsâ€ť, and he has announced plans to host a major global summit on â€śextremismâ€ť next month. And on the surface that sounds great. But precisely how are we supposed to determine whether someone is an â€śextremistâ€ť or not? What criteria should we use? As you will see below, your definition of an â€śextremistâ€ť may be far, far different from the definition that Barack...

The National Security Agency may have violated U.S. law for over a decade with the unauthorized surveillance of U.S. citizens' overseas communications, according to new reports on the agency's intelligence collection practices released by the NSA on Wednesday. The U.S. spy agency released the highly confidential reports in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). According to documents posted on the NSA website on Christmas Eve, the examples of violations include sending data on Americans to unauthorized recipients, storing such data on unprotected computers and retaining them after they were meant...

The federal government and the Obama administration are under fire for a variety of unconstitutional programs aimed at both militarizing and controlling local police and law enforcement, including supplying a vast array of sophisticated U.S. Defense Department “weapons of war” to city and county governments. Billions of dollars in military equipment has already been handed to municipal police departments and county sheriffs’ offices nationwide under the rapidly expanding federal schemes, but concerns from across the political spectrum are growing quickly as well. This year alone, over 150 so-called “mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles,” or MRAPs, used by U.S. forces in Iraq, were...

Cleveland killer officer shot to death 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was playing on a playground with a toy gun, no charges filed. Thirteen-year-old Andy Lopez Cruz was shot 7 times in 10 seconds by a California killer deputy early on a clear afternoon, he grand jury refused the case and the DA exonerated. Christopher Roupe, 17, was shot and killed after opening the door to a killer officer, mis-identified a remote control in Roupe’s hand' shot him in the chest with his Glock, at three ft. it exploded both the child's lungs.

Britain could be pushed towards a “police state” in which officers are turned into Orwellian “thought police” in the battle against extremism, one of the country’s top cops has warned.Sir Peter Fahy, the chief constable of Greater Manchester Police, said police should not be left to decide what is acceptable free speech as the threat of severe terrorist attack intensifies.Instead politicians, academics and others in civil society should have to decide when radical Islam veers into extremism and when anti-gay or anti-women’s rights sentiments cross the line.The vice-chair of the police’s terrorism committee warned that unless this happened, it would...

The U.S. National Security Agency should have an unlimited ability to collect digital information in the name of protecting the country against terrorism and other threats, an influential federal judge said during a debate on privacy. "I think privacy is actually overvalued," Judge Richard Posner, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, said during a conference about privacy and cybercrime in Washington, D.C., Thursday. "Much of what passes for the name of privacy is really just trying to conceal the disreputable parts of your conduct," Posner added. "Privacy is mainly about trying to improve your social and...

The Department of Homeland Security is poised to ditch all records from a controversial network monitoring system called Einstein that are at least three years old, but not for security reasons. DHS reasons the files -- which include data about traffic to government websites, agency network intrusions and general vulnerabilities -- have no research significance.

NODAWAY COUNTY, Mo. – A homeschooling family has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit after they say their home was illegally searched by the sheriff’s department. The Home School Legal Defense Association is aiding Laura and Jason Hagan. Their house was raided by Nodaway County Sheriff Darren White and Chief Sheriff’s Deputy David Glidden.

Rapid DNA technology makes it easier than ever to grab and store your genetic profile. G-men, cops, and Homeland Security can't wait to see it everywhere. Robert Schueren shook my hand firmly, handed me his business card, and flipped it over, revealing a short list of letters and numbers. "Here is my DNA profile." He smiled. "I have nothing to hide." I had come to meet Schueren, the CEO of IntegenX, at his company's headquarters in Pleasanton, California, to see its signature product: a machine the size of a large desktop printer that can unravel your genetic code in the...

A former Colorado jail officer has been arrested and charged with murdering his wife, three years after local detectives allegedly covered up evidence of his crime and ruled her death a suicide - even though she was shot in the back of the head. Ashley Fallis' family never believed the 28-year-old mother of three had killed herself and they campaigned for three years for police in Evans, Colorado, to reopen the case and investigate whether her husband, Tom Fallis, was responsible for the New Years Day 2012 shooting. Fallis, 34, was arrested today in Bloomington, Indiana, where he had been...

For at least the second time since 2012, the federal government has brought criminal charges, accusing someone of training people on how to beat a polygraph test. On Friday, prosecutors announced an indictment against Douglas G. Williams, a 69-year-old man from Norman, Okla., who’s accused of coaching people “how to lie and conceal crimes” during federally administered lie-detector tests. Mr. Williams, who operates a company called Polygraph.com, says the mail fraud and obstruction of justice charges leveled against him are an “attack on his First Amendment rights.” The indictment follows the federal prosecution of an Indiana man who received eight...

WASHINGTON — The federal government has significantly expanded undercover operations in recent years, with officers from at least 40 agencies posing as business people, welfare recipients, political protesters and even doctors or ministers to ferret out wrongdoing, records and interviews show. At the Supreme Court, small teams of undercover officers dress as students at large demonstrations outside the courthouse and join the protests to look for suspicious activity, according to officials familiar with the practice. At the Internal Revenue Service, dozens of undercover agents chase suspected tax evaders worldwide, by posing as tax preparers, accountants drug dealers or yacht buyers...

Students, teachers and parents were taken by surprise after an “active shooter drill” brought the Winter Haven middle school into lockdown as armed police officers burst into classrooms with their weapons drawn. Students at Jewett Middle Academy said they were terrified when police officers burst in the doors for a planned active shooter drill – but students and teachers are irked they were not told ahead of time. snip “We actually thought that someone was going to come in there and kill us,” the station quoted her as saying. But police say they conduct these drills for the absolute safety...

WASHINGTON—The Justice Department is scooping up data from thousands of cellphones through fake communications towers deployed on airplanes, a high-tech hunt for criminal suspects that is snagging a large number of innocent Americans, according to people familiar with the operations. The U.S. Marshals Service program, which became fully functional around 2007, operates Cessna aircraft from at least five metropolitan-area airports, with a flying range covering most of the U.S. population, according to people familiar with the program. Planes are equipped with devices—some known as “dirtboxes” to law-enforcement officials because of the initials of the Boeing Co. unit that produces them—which...

Former CBS News Correspondent Sharyl Attkisson — who claims the government hacked her computer, TV and phone while she reported on the Benghazi terror attack — has released a new video showing what could be evidence of the government taking over her computer. “That very night, with [White House spokesman Eric] Schultz, [White House Press Secretary Jay] Carney and company freshly steaming over my Benghazi reporting, I’m home doing final research and crafting questions for the next day’s interview with [Thomas] Pickering. Suddenly data in my computer file begins wiping at hyperspeed before my very eyes. Deleted line by line...

A former CBS News reporter who quit the network over claims it kills stories that put President Obama in a bad light says she was spied on by a “government-related entity” that planted classified documents on her computer. In her new memoir, Sharyl Attkisson says a source who arranged to have her laptop checked for spyware in 2013 was “shocked” and “flabbergasted” at what the analysis revealed.

From the moment that Sharyl Attkisson met a shadowy source I’ll call Big Mac, she was plunged into a nightmare involving mysterious surveillance of her computers. They met at a McDonald’s in Northern Virginia at the beginning of 2013, and the source (she dubs him Number One) warned her about the threat of government spying. During their next hamburger rendezvous, Big Mac told Attkisson, then a CBS News reporter constantly at odds with the Obama administration, that he was “shocked” and “flabbergasted” by his examination of her computer and that this was “worse than anything Nixon ever did.” Attkisson’s forthcoming...

O'REILLY: "Personal Story" segment tonight. CBS News announced on Friday that Investigative Correspondent Sharyl Attkisson's computer was hacked into late last year. This, combined with the James Rosen situation here at Fox News and the A.P. snooping, causing a lot of concern. With us now on a Factor Cable Exclusive is Ms. Attkisson. So, when did you know that somebody was messing with your computer. SHARYL ATTKISSON, INVESTIGATIVE CORRESPONDENT, CBS NEWS: Well, there were signs probably around 2011 but I don't think I recognized exactly what was going on until perhaps the fall of last year when so many things...

Last year Former CBS News investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson, who is known for incredible work on Operation Fast and Furious, Benghazi and other White House scandals, noticed her computers at work and at home were acting strange. She suspected someone had hacked into her computer, specifically into a desktop in her home due to the machine turning on and off by itself at all hours of the night. An initial review of the hard drive revealed that her computer had in fact been compromised, but it wasn't known at the time who did it. The intruder into her system didn't...

Via the Right Scoop, a follow-up to Fridayâ€™s post. Forgive me for a possibly stupid question but when she says that her computers were turning on and off, she means they were powering on and then powering down, not that they were merely â€śwaking upâ€ť from sleep mode, right? When I tweeted the link to this, a bunch of people tweeted back that a computer might â€śwake upâ€ť automatically due to Windows Update. But Attkisson has had professional computer forensics people investigate, though; obviously she knows the difference by now between a computer updating itself and doing something freaky weird...

James Tully, of Candensis, does not own a car and walks to work through the search area. He has been stopped and questioned by authorities numerous times, eventually being forced to the ground at gunpoint. The man who has been stopped by police numerous times while walking to work through the manhunt search area has been overwhelmed by the public's response, according to his mother, Linda Waddington Tully. There have been offers of vehicles, a fundraiser, and lots of media attention. James Tully, 39, lives off Snow Hill Road in Canadensis, which has been a key area in the search...

The sickening transformation of these United States into an authoritarian police state with an incarceration rate that would make Joseph Stalin blush, has been a key theme of my writing since well before the launch of Liberty Blitzkrieg. American Police Make an Arrest Every 2 Seconds in 2012. In the event you never read it, I suggest taking a look before tackling the rest of this piece. Fast forward to fall 2014, and the Wall Street Journal has a powerful article about how children in schools systems across the U.S. are being arrested or turned over to police custody for...

James Tully of Canadensis, who has to walk to work in the heart of the Eric Frein search area, has been stopped by police more than 20 times, including an encounter Friday night when he says he was roughed by an officer. Police searching for Eric Frein have questioned James Tully so many times that he started carrying his driver’s license and work identification on a neck lanyard to prove his identity. But that wasn’t enough to keep him from being forced to the ground by gunpoint Friday on Route 447, and being held there, face down in the gravel,...

Nashville Police Chief Steve Anderson is blowing the whistle on alleged misconduct by the U.S. Secret Service during a January 2013 incident involving a man who reportedly made fake death threats against President Barack Obama on Facebook. The resident refused to let officers enter his home or follow orders to come outside . He was heard shouting at officers, “show me your warrant.” In a letter to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Anderson claimed that a Secret Service agent asked a police sergeant to “wave a piece of paper” in order to “dupe” the suspect into thinking...

Outright tyranny, the loss of our freedoms, and a totalitarian regime the likes of which the world has never seen before. “Let your motto be resistance! resistance! Resistance! No oppressed people have ever secured their liberty without resistance.”—Abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet The perils of resisting the police state grow more costly with each passing day, especially if you hope to escape with your life and property intact. The thing you must remember is that we’ve entered an age of militarized police in which we’re no longer viewed as civilians but as enemy combatants. Take, for example, Mary Elizabeth VandenBerg who...

Fugitive gunman Eric Frein has again evaded the massive police dragnet that has now been hunting him for 16 days as he ran into woods after being spotted in the Pocono Mountains. Frein, 31, wanted for murdering one state trooper and critically injuring another, managed to flee, although MailOnline understands they have a jacket that he left behind. Frein, who is on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted List, was seen just outside the perimeter of the five-square-mile search area that up to 1,000 cops are manning at any one time. The sighting led to a huge shift southwards as heavily...

It looks like the days of trading half of your peanut butter and jelly sandwich for half of your best friend’s ham sandwich may soon be over if the federal government has anything to do with it. A Richmond, Virginia mother received the following note, telling her not to pack a lunch for her pre-school age child. Dear Parents, I have received word from Federal Programs Preschool pertaining to lunches from home. Parents are to be informed that students can only bring lunches from home if there is a medical condition requiring a specific diet, along with a physicians note...

I would like to remind readers that we live in a country that is barely free. If we lived in ideal political conditions in which the only flaw might be a border closed to some or all immigration, the “open borders” argument might hold water. But we live in a growing authoritarian or police state. This is an issue which many intellectuals – including some I should logically regard as moral and intellectual allies – shy away from like frightened turtles. This country for too long has been the plaything of statists and “social engineers” of every stripe – Republicans,...

Parents' House Seized Over Son's $40 In Drugs The rare moments Christos Sourovelis can take a break from running his own painting business, he can be found toiling away on his family's dream house in the suburbs of Philadelphia. "I'm a working guy. I work every day, six days a week, even seven if I have to," Sourovelis says. One day this past March, without warning, the government took his house away, even though he and his wife, Markella, have never been charged with a crime or accused of any wrongdoing...

SD Unified gets armored vehicle City schools police have obtained their own military-grade Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle through a federal grant. Known as an MRAP, the armored mobile will be converted into a victim rescue vehicle that will be stocked with thousands of dollars in advanced medical supplies and be able to take heavy fire in case of an attack on campus, the San Diego Unified School District Police Department said Tuesday. The MRAP, valued at more than $700,000, was acquired at no cost to the district. The vehicle is expected to be operational in October. “We recognize the public...

This is a battlefield, a war zone—if you will—governed by martial law and disguised as a democracy “Police are specialists in violence. They are armed, trained, and authorized to use force. With varying degrees of subtlety, this colors their every action. Like the possibility of arrest, the threat of violence is implicit in every police encounter. Violence, as well as the law, is what they represent.”—Kristian Williams, activist and author If you don’t want to get probed, poked, pinched, tasered, tackled, searched, seized, stripped, manhandled, arrested, shot, or killed, don’t say, do or even suggest anything that even hints of...

A 23-year-old teacher at a Cambridge, Maryland, middle school has been placed on leave and—in the words of a local news report—"taken in for an emergency medical evaluation" for publishing, under a pseudonym, a novel about a school shooting. The novelist, Patrick McLaw, an eighth-grade language-arts teacher at the Mace's Lane Middle School, was placed on leave by the Dorchester County Board of Education, and is being investigated by the Dorchester County Sheriff's Office, according to news reports from Maryland's Eastern Shore. The novel, by the way, is set 900 years in the future. Sheriff Phillips told the newspaper that,...